Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Question is up there , answer is unknown , i like it underwater , it does a cool underwater distortion effect without crippling fps (as long as you dont set it too high) , so i brought it back in!
like always i will try to do an Option for it :) so you can decide if you want underwater blur or not

soooo.... it can look really different depending on if you login underwater and what your settings are at , here are 2 examples how it might look

an extreme but somehow more realistic one normal underwater with my new default settings

Did you ever notice SSAO at all? , do you even KNOW what SSAO is and what it does? SSAO means Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and makes SL look better in many Ways , the most noticable difference is smoothend shadows , the second one is the dark corners thingy according to Wikipedia it can be easily implemented into any Modern Video Game , also according to Wikipedia the first game ever with SSAO was Crysis (which sounds VERY VERY unbelievable) as SL got Deferred and SSAO at a similar time and SL is about 10 Years old (Real, it was officially released 2003 so its normally just 8 Years) , anyway...

for those who want to read about it,
for people that want to see it in SL , i changed the default settings of SSAO , Glow and DoF again , but this time correctly (i hope so >.<) and SSAO has been changed more than in Build 7

today i worked again a bit on the UI making more floaters more transparent and stealing their ugly half-transparent black background as for now it looks better but still needs much work , i also included Qarls aligning tool which sadly doesnt work with the new render pipeline anymore , i hope Qarl will help me and others with it, then there were those pie menus , i worked back and forth for them just to see that i can start Pie Menus all over again , so i was too lazy to implement them for now (will do later) instead i played again a bit with the permission icons in People panel and made them stay visible whenever you´ve hovered over them for atlast one time , and Profile/Info buttons are visible always now =D again a little progress , heres a pic like always (cant talk about progress and ui and this stuff without posting a pic...)

today i worked a bit on merging some new stuff , and a wind fix , wind should now work again , and it gets even cooler , they added debug displays to show you from where wind is coming and where it goes , like a real weather announcer thingy!

while doing so i started readding all my tricky options i made for my UI , meaning you can now switch all the Quick Buttons , Draw Distance Slider and Search off again if you wish

the next thing was Chat range rings which i readded , this time (like i will do a few more times in future) with 3 rings , so i added another one (like i added a fourth toolbar at the top) , which indicates Whisper range, i will later also allow them to be toggled off seperatly and maybe colored seperatly aswell

my next step will probably to add Local Bitmaps 2.0 again which i personally dont use ...or atlast very very rarely , but will be usefull feature and addition to Building , aswell as simple maths will come into the viewer again to allow calculations in spinners like 274.02 + 40.5 = 314.52 (if its not in the viewer already)
chat floater will remain as floater for a while , i will wait for LL to see what they will do , if they revert it back to a panel , i will do aswell , if not , i will revert it back to a panel on my own (maybe they will add an option to toggle it)

Friday, October 28, 2011

the blue pill comes with Build 7 Release and will give you a last look at what has been done... and the red pill will come with a Beta of Build 8 and will give you a look at the future of the Viewer in 3.2.1 , many parts of the UI are still WIP , and many options have been disabled (dont work) but the worst things have been already finished , IM/Notifications are back at the bottom and a fourth Toolbar has been made at the top of the screen to allow dragging buttons up there like you can to left , right and aswell the bottom , please make a copy of your settings and delete them if you wanna use Build 8 , as this is a whole new Viewer , with whole new Option set , your old options may cause curruption or crashs , also dont be too hard to it , its the beginning , it might crash a few times at login so make sure you keep trying

tell me what you think about the changes i made to the FUI and lemme know your performance and overall opinion about it

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

just a little bugfix release , and WIP changes you wont see as normal user, the fixes include correct glow settings again (i found the bug i accidentally set max alpha glow to 0.36 instead of 0.036 which made glow EXTREME) , fixed Project S19 default settings , meaning that all bottom buttons should be hidden now and project S19 should be active as default , aswell as some other little options....and the last fix is a desyncronisation between your clicks and the actual click-hit position which was caused by forcing the chatbar to be BEHIND the Voice controls as default....i forgot that moving the Chatbar as default will cause the whole "screen" to move making you click on yourself and hitting the ground a few pixels away instead of yourself
this build is mainly good for people that noticed those above bugs and for new people that will be shocked at start with the glow settings (not on my watch! not anymore)

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Ok here we go with Beta 2 , also this time i´ll hand out a Dave P. Shining fixes Viewer for you to test one of the most recent Render Pipeline Viewers , with lots of changes in Render Pipeline , i ask you to try both and tell me which runs better in general , faster , not stable (i know the answer already)... also try new Video Cards with Shining Fixes and especially try Antialiasing with Deferred Rendering and Depth of Field , leave me a comment , because this will decide if i go directly to 3.1.1 or stay at 2.8.2 base im (still) at with fixes and some changes of higher Versions

Changes include lots of fixes , some for crash , fading Login (will later better used) , also some tweaks to Progressscreen , now it allows clicking the interface during TP / Login , oh and dont let us forget the last letter missing fix when you select bunch of text and copy it :)

Heres the full Changelist of Beta 1/2:

ER-70: from a sim bug, but object can also crash viewer.EXP-939 Fade from intro/loading page to world, not to image of last loginEXP-938 Turn off in-world audio until fade from intro/loading page completeEXP-932 Implement system that fades from login page to (either) intro screen or loading screen instead of using a hard cutEXP-880 FIX Enable navigation chrome in search floaterSTORM-1417: [crashhunters] crash at [0] STORM-1311 FIXED Provide more space for parcel description in the Place Profile when coming from search.STORM-1234 FIXED text editor selection which was skipping the last character in line.SH-2454 Fix for head attachments not casting shadows when in mouselook mode.SH-2276 Remove some log spam to alleviate stalls on login.SH-2276 Update window often during login to avoid windows TDR eventsSH-2242 FXAA support instead of unreliable multisample texturesSH-2218 WORK AROUND -- v2.8.x Viewers crash consistently when I actively use other applicationsSH-2200 Fix for BSOD on 7800 Go on Vista when setting graphics detail to "High"SH-1838 Add error handling for allocation of off screen render targets.Re-enabled Fulscreenmodified Chatbar to autohide when losing focus

Saturday, October 1, 2011

ok Ladies n Gentlement , Build 6 is out now! =D
i reworked plenty of Settings and a bit of my UI , removed some unnecessenary options and sliders from Build 5 , added some new like a whole new additional glow strenght slider.
Project S19 has been redone , 1080p is now gone as it isnt needed anymore , the buttons will now autoresize automatically to the middle of your screen (mostly) and because of this i made it default , my whole new UI is now completly default , too see all my new default settings including the graphic tweaks i did , you´ll have to delete/rename your settings , the viewer should now also use a seperate cache folder :) , it features Local Bitmaps 2.0 (which is still beta but works great) , a new object weights floater with all needed information in one little window and all my Mod Skins i made for Kirstens , they are beta but because im now working on my own Viewer i will have to update these over time as they are now inofficially officially supported hehe...
build 6 final comes with some additional bugfixes up to 3.0.6 , you can look them up at the end of this Post